The True Story of Rubin “Hurricane”
Carter

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s fist smashed into the
little woman’s face and Carolyn Kelly went flying
across the hotel room like a rag doll. Then the
prizefighter began to kick the small woman. After
this savage attack Carolyn’s son found her curled on
the floor in a fetal position. She had a swollen cheek
and black eyes. She would need traction for her
injured back. Carter denied everything.

In 1975 Ms Kelly, a devout Muslim, had been asked
by Muhammad Ali to help in an effort to win a new
trial for Rubin Carter, who insisted that he had been
framed for a triple murder. She had devoted a year of
her life to raising funds for a legal appeal of Carter’s
conviction. That effort had succeeded, and in March
1976 Carter was let loose pending a new trial. Six
weeks later, in Maryland, Carolyn Kelly had
attempted to telephone Carter to resolve a minor
financial arrangement. She was surprised when Carter hung up on her. She thought he hadn’t understood who she was, so she went to his hotel to see him in person. This is how she described their meeting:

“So I immediately got dressed, got in
my car, drove...to the Sheraton, knocked on his door,
and he asked who was it. I told him. He opened the
door; I went in. He just started laughing, just
laughing, laughing. So naturally I relaxed. I thought it
was some kind of joke or something... Then he went
into the bathroom. He left the [bathroom] door open,
and I walked to the edge of the [bathroom] door, and
as I was asking him what the hell is the matter with
you, what’s wrong. At that point he was gargling with a bottle of Charlie cologne. He spit the cologne out, he came out of the bathroom and I was standing by the edge of the bed and he just burst out laughing
again. The next thing I knew he had hit me in my face and spun me around. I felt myself turning and
spinning and felt myself going down and fighting to
hold onto consciousness... I went between the wall
and [the bed]. And then he raised his foot to kick me,
still laughing all the time... and he started kicking me
in my back. Things were vague... he wasn’t
laughing...he was in a stooped position with his hands
around my throat telling me he was going to kill me.”

She had become the latest of hundreds of victims of
Rubin Carter, whose life of anti-social behavior
began in early childhood. For almost thirty years
Rubin Carter had exhibited an extremely hostile and
violent personality.

In the seventh grade he attended Public School #6 in
Paterson, but was sent several times to the
Adjustment School for students with behavioral
problems. School records describe Carter as “very
wild” with a “bullying attitude” and state that he
“terrorized boys and girls in class.” These earliest
records reveal his proclivity for violence, threats and
retaliation which characterize his unchanging
personality. Carter was first referred to the Juvenile
Division of the Paterson Police Department in 1946,
at age 9, when he was only four years out of
kindergarten! Three years after that he was arrested
for larceny.

Though Carter’s parents were hard-working people
who provided well for their son, Carter enjoyed
stealing. In May of 1951 he was convicted of looting
money from parking meters. He was given probation.
The following month, at age 14, he smashed a bottle
over a man’s head and relieved him of his wristwatch
and fifty-five dollars. He was sent to the State Home
for Boys in July 1951 and paroled in December 1952.
He was returned to the Home after a parole
revocation in September 1953. He escaped from the
State Home July 1st, 1954.

The following month Rubin Carter enlisted in the
Army. The Army booted him out after he was
convicted by court-martial four times in 21 months.
Years later, in 1973, while serving a sentence for
triple murder, Rubin Carter authored a book titled
The Sixteenth Round. In it he reflected on his
Army experience:

“...This Army life was not making me any nastier
than what I was, but it wasn’t making it any easier for
me either. It just made me care a little less than usual,
which wasn’t a helluva lot in the first place.”

Two months after his separation from the Army,
Carter was arrested in Paterson on the escape charge
after he fled the State Home for Boys. He
was returned to Jamesburg and then transferred to
Annandale on March 29, 1957. He described his state
of mind on that day: “On that Tuesday morning
when Annandale set me free, they might not have
known it (or maybe they did) but they had just
unleashed a walking, ticking, short-fused time bomb
set to explode on contact with an unsuspecting
public.”

Three months after his release, Rubin Carter
attacked three strangers at two different crime scenes.
This is how tough-guy Rubin Carter described his
crimes: “We snatched a pocketbook off a woman
June 30th, on a street in Paterson. Then we seen a
man and got him too, a young fellow about 30, got
his money, he was knocked down. We was running
away from the last fell [victim] and another fell
[victim] was standing in the middle of the sidewalk
and I hit him and he fell up against a tree and we kept
running... It was unnecessary. I had
nine dollars or ten dollars in my pocket and the next
day was pay day. It just come on the
impulse.” [Emphasis added]

By his own admission, Rubin Carter was not driven
to criminal behavior by any pressing need for money.
He had money in his pocket. Tomorrow was pay day.
He attacked three strangers because “It just come on
the impulse.” In other words, he was a violent
creature with no impulse control. On September 20,
1957, Carter was convicted on all three charges and
sentenced to a term totaling 2 to 6 years in State
Prison. He served his maximum sentence because of
his continual tumultuous behavior in prison. As
prison records go, Rubin Carter’s was exceptional for
its consistent belligerence and hostility. While in
prison he repeatedly picked fights, stole from other
inmates and incited a riot.

After the attack in which Carter robbed a woman and
seriously injured two men, Carter was evaluated by a
psychologist in September 1958. The psychologist
described Carter as “an emotionally unstable and
aggressive individual”. He concluded that Carter
“manifests a total lack of insight.” He reported that
Carter had a strong paranoid orientation and was
prone to projecting his own failures onto society. The
psychologist saw Rubin Carter as “a potential threat
to the community.” This same psychologist
understood that Carter’s boxing activity created a
socially acceptable means for releasing his almost
super-human hostility. He predicted that when
Carter’s boxing career was in decline “he will
become more aggressive and it is predicted that a
repetition of the present involvement (anti-social
violence) will occur.”

Carter lost his fight for the middleweight title on
December 14, 1964. In 1965 and 1966, he fought
fifteen matches and won fewer than half of them. His
boxing career was in steep decline and he was no
longer a contender for the middleweight crown. The
exact circumstances that the psychologist predicted
would trigger heightened violence in Rubin Carter
existed in 1966.

Slaughter at the Lafayette Grill

At 2:30 in the morning of June 17, 1966, Rubin
Carter and John Artis burst into the Lafayette Bar and
Grill on Paterson’s East 18th Street. Carter was toting
a double-barreled shotgun; Artis was holding a 32
caliber revolver. The bartender, James Oliver, was
standing by the cash register. Fred Nanyoks was
seated at the bar, near Oliver. At the end of the bar,
Hazel Tanis sipped her drink. She was a friend of the
bartender and she had stopped in to chat with him
after her hard-day’s work as a waitress. Bill Marins
sat two stools away from Mr. Nanyoks. When the
bartender saw the two gun-toting blacks he knew
exactly what the score was. Jim Oliver hurled a beer
bottle at the gunmen. It smashed harmlessly against
the air conditioner. Oliver turned to flee. It was then
that Rubin Carter shot the unarmed bartender in the
back. The blast severed his spine and killed him on
the spot. John Artis immediately shot Mr. Nanyoks
behind the ear, killing him. Then Artis shot Mr.
Marins above the eye. Mr. Marins, one eye blinded
and his skull fractured, stumbled around the bar and
then collapsed. Carter and Artis left him for dead. As
they were leaving, the gunmen caught sight of Hazel
Tanis who was helplessly trapped in the corner. She
screamed as Carter fired a shotgun blast into the
terrified mother of four. Artis fired four shots at her.
They left her fatally wounded.

Carter and Artis walked out onto the 18th Street
sidewalk and turned right; walked around the
corner onto Lafayette where their big white getaway
car was waiting. They were in high spirits and
laughing loudly.

Fifty feet away, a small-time crook named Alfred
Bello was walking toward them. Bello had heard the
gunshots. He mistakenly believed that the armed men
coming toward him were police detectives. When he
was within fifteen feet of them he realized what he
had stumbled upon. Bello turned and ran. The
gunmen, whose firearms were empty, drove away in
the big white car. It was Bello who discovered the
dead and wounded inside the Lafayette Grill. He
alerted the police.

Alfred Bello got a good close-range look at Carter
and Artis. He identified them to the police. He also
gave police a description of the getaway car. Another
eyewitness, Pat Valentine, was looking down from
her bay window and saw the two killers enter the
white car and flee the crime scene. She notified the
police at 2:34. A general call was issued to the
Paterson police to look for a white car with “two
colored occupants.” Sgt Theodore Capter and his
partner stopped Rubin Carter’s big white Dodge at
2:40, only ten minutes after the killing.
Twenty-year-old John Artis was behind the steering
wheel and Rubin Carter was lying down in the
shadows in the back seat. A well known barfly named John “Bucks” Royster was sitting in the front
passenger seat beside Artis. The officers checked the
car’s registration and let them go because there were
three men in the car, not two. Soon
thereafter, Carter and Artis dropped off Royster.
Later, at the crime scene, the officers received a
detailed description of the white getaway car from
eyewitness Alfred Bello. Sgt Capster recalled that
moment: “I looked at my partner and he looked at me
and we took off looking for the car again.” Both
Alfred Bello and Patty Valentine were able to
describe the distinctive tail lights of Carter’s white
car in considerable detail. Carter and Artis were
apprehended by Officers Capter and DeChellis at 3
a.m. and brought to the murder scene for
questioning.

A search of Carter’s car found a shotgun shell and a
32 caliber bullet. Carter and Artis gave conflicting
stories about their activities the evening of the
murders. Carter failed a lie detector test miserably.
Hazel Tanis, who died 27 days after the Lafayette
Grill attack, identified Rubin Carter from
photographs and helped the police draw a sketch of
Artis. Hazel Tanis’ daughter quoted her mother thus:
“You don’t look a person in the eyes, plead for your
life and forget what he looks like.”

The Trials

Juries twice found Carter guilty of triple murder (the
fourth gunshot victim survived). There was, as
Carter’s own lawyer said, “a mountain of evidence”
against Rubin Carter. Carter won the right to a second trial because of a media campaign that focused on Alfred Bello’s recantation of his eyewitness identification of Carter and Artis. Unfortunately for Carter, when Bello took the witness stand at the second trial he blabbed the reason for his recantation:
He had been promised $27,000 by Carter’s defense
team to lie about what he had witnessed. That’s
called witness tampering. Bello wasn’t alone. At the
second trial in 1976, four of Carter’s other alibi
witnesses also swore under oath that they had lied at
Carter’s first trial at Carter’s request. Among them
was Catherine McGuire who had testified that she
had been with Carter at the time of the killings. A
letter exists, written in Carter’s own hand, which he
sent to Catherine McGuire from the Passaic County
Jail, in which he coaches her on how she and her
mother should lie before the jury. Carter was
convicted a second time.

At the 1976 trial the prosecution had argued that
Carter’s motivation for the murders was revenge.
Earlier on the evening of the murders a black bar
owner in Paterson had been shot dead by a white
man. After this killing Carter had spoken to one of
the dead man’s relatives. He had also inquired about
a shotgun. No attempt was made to rob the Lafayette
Grill. The day’s cash receipts were still in the cash
register.

After almost two decades of judge shopping, Carter’s
defense team had the good luck to present their
arguments to ultra-liberal Judge Lee Sarokin.
Sarokin ordered a new trial for Carter on the grounds
that the prosecution should never have been permitted to argue that racial animus was Carter’s motive. In Sarokin’s words: “For the state to contend
that an accused has the motive to commit murder
soley because of his membership in a racial group is
an argument which should never be permitted to sway a jury or provide the basis of a conviction.”

This is junk jurisprudence at its worst! The successful
prosecution of racially-motivated assassinations
would end abruptly if prosecutors were barred from
suggesting racial animus as a possible motive. What,
after all, motivated the assassin of Martin Luther
King? Of Medger Evers? Of James Byrd, Jr.?

The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office chose not to
try Carter a third time because Carter was nearing a
parole date and some witnesses had died. The fact
remains that there was “a mountain of evidence”
against Rubin Carter. There were eyewitnesses who
placed him at the crime scene. His alibi witnesses
admitted that they had lied at his request. Carter was
convicted twice by fair-minded juries. There were
black people in both of his jury pools and blacks
served on the second jury that convicted him for the
triple murder. There is no doubt that Carter, who had
been terrorizing others almost since kindergarten and
who enjoyed sadistically stabbing and shooting total
strangers merely for amusement, was capable of
committing murder.

Enter the Liberal Liars & Fools

All of this would be of no more than historical
interest, but for one thing: In 1973, while serving
time for the Lafayette Grill murders, Carter wrote a
book. It was nothing more than a bound volume of
self-serving lies, but he used all the electric buzz
words: racism, oppression, police brutality, etc. It was
like so much bloody chum in the water, drawing to
him a school of gushing left-leaning Hollywood
celebrities, corrupt academics, a fading folk singer
and a host of hopeful, but uncritical, people eager to
do a good deed. Their collective mission was to free
Rubin Carter and to prove that America was a hateful
racist nation in the bargain.

The intellectual droppings of Carter’s supporters
included a gawky ballad by Bob Dylan called
“Hurricane.” Two books Lazarus and the
Hurricane (1991) and Hurricane (1999)
both embraced the falsified version of events that
Carter had laid out for them like a blueprint. The
authors repeated Carter’s pumped-up self-serving
descriptions of events even when they were
contradicted by court testimony and even
photographic evidence. Carter and the others simply
omitted evidence when it contradicted their intent.
Their intent was to deceive you with pulp fiction
propaganda.

Because most people avoid the effort of reading
anything, the most influential tool for spreading
falsehoods about Carter and about America’s judicial
system was the slick 1999 movie called The
Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington as Rubin
Carter.

From the opening credits onward this movie is a
web of lies and distortions and omissions by its
creators Bernstein and Jewison. It is a vehicle for the
hostility of the Hollywood Left. Their purpose is to
deceive you into believing that a life-long sociopath
is really a saint, and that American law enforcement
is a monstrosity.

For example: In the movie, the scene where the
gunmen exit the Lafayette Grill is carefully crafted so
that the gunmen are mere shadowy figures who sprint
across the sidewalk and enter a darkened automobile.
This is Norman Jewison’s conscious attempt to
deceive you into believing that all of the eyewitness
testimony against Rubin Carter is worthless. The
truth is that the getaway car was parked around the
corner from the Lafayette Grill. To get to the car
Carter and Artis had to turn right and walk around the
corner. They came face to face with Alfred Bello at a
distance of 10 or 15 feet. Fifteen feet is four feet less
than the length of a Cadillac. When Bello realized
that they weren’t gun-toting cops, he ran for his life.
The excellent detailed descriptions of the getaway car
by eyewitnesses Alfred Bello and Patty Valentine
matched Carter’s white 1966 Dodge perfectly.

Another example: In the movie Jewison creates a
scene where a group of Canadian Carter supporters
stumble upon a slip of paper, handwritten by a racist
cop, that suggests that the murders took place at 2:45,
instead of 2:30. The implication is that the police
changed the stated time of the crime so that they
could frame poor innocent Rubin Carter . It’s all a
cunning Jewison lie. Both Pat Valentine, who
witnessed the killers’ getaway and Officer Jim
Lawless, who was the first policeman to arrive at the
crime scene, were certain that the murders occurred at
2:30. Pat Valentine’s call to the police was sent and
received at 2:34. That’s when a call went out on the
police radio to be on the lookout for a white car with
“two colored occupants.” Six minutes later Officers
Capter and DeChellis stopped Carter’s 1966 white
Dodge. They checked the registration and then let the
car go because there is a third man in the car, even
though Carter had been lying down in the darkened backseat.
Twenty minutes after that, after receiving a better
description of the getaway car, the officers once again
stopped Carter and Artis and brought them to the
crime scene.

The movie scene where police cars and armed police
converge on Carter’s car was carefully contrived by
Bernstein and Jewison to convince you that Carter
was framed and that his apprehension was planned
well in advance. It’s all a lie. No such event ever
happened. Bernstein and Jewison are two skilled
Left-wing propagandists. They know that “seeing is
believing”; if you “see” the scene, you will believe it.
But this scene never happened in real life. This is the
truth: Officer Capter requested assistance and a single
squad car came to his aid. Capter told Carter to
follow him back to the Lafayette Grill. The second
police car followed them.

Carter’s description of the scene back at the Lafayette
Grill as being “like a lynch mob” is another attempt
to deceive you. Photographs taken at the scene show
the area around the Lafayette Grill to be quiet, well
lit, and almost unpopulated. It was three in the
morning and most of Paterson’s population was
sound asleep. But why shouldn’t Bernstein and
Jewison lie about it? Their purpose, after all, is to
look like proper leftists to the rest of the orthodox
Hollywood Left. They believe in a “higher” truth, that
America is a bad place and all black men are martyrs
to white racism.

The dirtiest indecency that Bernstein and Jewison
commit is their slanderous depiction of Detective
Vincent DeSimone, who is presented to you, the
viewer, as the fictional character Lt. Vincent Della
Pesca. In the movie, the obscenity-spewing Della
Pesca is obsessed with nailing Carter for the triple
slaying. This character pursues the “innocent” Carter
from the time he was eleven years old; he is on hand
as a glowering demonic presence the day Carter is
released from prison.

The realVincent DeSimone was a religious man who
did not use profanity. He had no contact with Carter
until after the Lafayette murders. Jewison portrays
him as a foul-mouthed racist Neanderthal who lies,
cheats and forges a signature in an effort to frame
Rubin Carter. None of these things happened in real
life. Carter was never found to have been framed.
Bernstein and Jewison get totally down in the gutter
when they make a big point of DeSimone’s less than
perfect appearance. In fact, Detective DeSimone was
a good-looking salesman before the Second World
War, but then he answered the call to defend
democracy and was shot on the face by a Nazi. He
had nineteen reconstructive surgeries on his face.
That’s just a big laugh to Bernstein and Jewison
whose fat asses DeSimone helped to save from Heinrich Himmler.

After the war, DeSimone was too self-conscious
about his appearance to continue life as a salesman,
so he became a police officer. He started as a street
cop in Paterson and worked his way up to become the
chief detective in the county. Bernstein and Jewison
even descend so low as to have the Della Pesca
character threaten the lives of the saintly Canadian
commune members who worked on Carter’s defense.
It’s another dirty lie. In fact, Vincent DeSimone died
in 1979. But that didn’t stop these leftist
propagandists from showing the long-dead detective
sabotaging the wheel of the Canadians’ Volvo,
causing a near-fatal crash. Jewison’s message to you:
the cops are the real menace.

So how did Bernstein and Jewison get away with
telling so many grotesque lies about an honorable
policeman? Well, they went to the legal department
of their Hollywood movie studio and were told by
their slick Hollywood lawyers that under American
law a dead person cannot suffer a defamation
of character. In other words, anyone can say any
slimy thing about any dead person without fear of
legal retaliation. After they heard that, Bernstein and
Jewison threw human decency to the winds.

This utterly false portrayal has caused the DeSimone
family great pain. Vincent DeSimone’s son, Jim, has
said “I came out of the theater and I was absolutely
appalled. I was his only son. I went through a life of
him telling me about honesty and integrity. He was
regarded as the most honest guy around. I sat there
and I said to myself, ‘What is Denzel Washington
thinking?’ He should have some conscience as to
what he’s doing here.”

Denzel Washington, for the record, has no
conscience, no intellectual curiosity and no moral
courage. He told a reporter that when he sees a
newspaper article about the “Hurricane,” he just
closes the newspaper. Washington also chose to close
his eyes to the credible evidence and to Carter’s
life-long history of ultra-violence against the
innocent. He accepted Carter’s self-serving version of
all things without reservation. Washington called
Rubin Carter the embodiment of love. Washington
used his celebrity stature to disparage the honest
efforts of the police, prosecutors and twenty-four
jurors. Carter is clearly Denzel’s kind of guy. And
besides, Denzel was padding his bank account with
his conscience-free portrayal of Rubin Carter.

Another dirty Jewison deception occurs in the scene
where Al Bello is shown sitting before a tape recorder
while Lieutenant Della Pesca promises not to
prosecute him for burglary and then proceeds to ask
Bello some very leading questions. Bello seizes the
chance for freedom and tells the detective that it was
Carter whom he saw fleeing the Lafayette Grill.

Jewison places an actor depicting Arthur Dexter
Bradley, Bello’s sometime accomplice, in plain view
behind Bello during the interrogation. Jewison wants
you to believe that Bello falsely accused Carter to
beat a burglary charge and that Bello and Bradley
conspired with dishonest policemen to create a
unified case against Carter. It’s all a lie.

The truth is that Alfred Bello identified Carter to the
police on October 3, 1966. Paterson Detective
LaConte had seen Bello’s car outside a bar and he
had gone inside to chat with Bello. Bello told the
detective that he had been threatened and told to keep
his mouth shut about the Lafayette murders. Bello
complained that the police once had the killers in
custody, but had let them go free. He told LaConte
that Carter was the killer. LaConte persuaded Bello to
meet with LaConte’s boss, Sergeant Mohl. Bello once
again identified Rubin Carter as the killer. Later, on
October 11th, Bello met with Lt. Vincent DeSimone
at which time Bello identified Rubin Carter a third
time as the killer. This was the meeting that is so
falsified in the movie. During the interrogation of
Bello the tape recorder was hidden; Bello did not
know that he was being recorded. Arthur Bradley was
not present; he was miles away in the Bordentown
Reformatory. Bradley had identified Carter five days
before, on October 6th. Bradley had no opportunity to
coordinate his story with Bello’s story; he had not
seen Bello for months. Nonetheless, their detailed
stories about what happened at the Lafayette Grill
were the same. Because the disruption caused by the
Lafayette Grill murders had frustrated a nearby
burglary planned by Bello and Bradley, the police had
no evidence to use against the would-be crooks.
Jewison invented all of that coercive dialog in an
attempt to deceive you.

Jewison goes all-out to win sympathy for Carter by
carefully crafting a boxing scene in which Carter
pounds the Middleweight Champion Joey Giardello
to a messy pulp, only to have the judges declare
Giardello the victor. You are supposed to be stung by
the injustice of it all, but it’s all a load of crap!

“Hurricane” Carter had only one title fight in his
career and he lost it decisively! The more experienced
Giardello bobbed and weaved through fifteen rounds
with Carter, with the champ consistently scoring with
his left. Giardello won a unanimous decision in front
of six thousand spectators. Experienced sports
reporters Jerry Izenberg, Bob Lipsyte and Jesse
Abramson all agreed with the decision. Carter would
never go fifteen rounds again. He had only fifteen
more fights and he lost most of them. His career was
in steep decline at the time of the Lafayette murders.
A mental health professional had predicted that
Rubin Carter would become more violently
anti-social as his boxing career went down hill.

Jewison attempts to portray Rubin Carter as an
innocent man with nothing to hide at the time of his
apprehension. He is shown in the movie sitting in the
front seat of his car when the police stop him only ten
minutes after the murders. It’s just more Hollywood
con-artistry. In truth, Carter was trying to remain
hidden by lying down in the darkened back seat of the
car. He knew that a witness had stared straight into
his face only minutes earlier.

In a blatantly propagandistic scene that would have
made Leni Riefensthal blush, Jewison contrives a
courtroom setting that practically shouts that Carter
was denied justice by a racist white jury and a corrupt
American court system. The truth of the matter is that
the jury was selected from Hudson County, rather
than Passaic County where the murders were
committed, so as to improve Carter’s chances of an
unbiased jury. There were black people in both of
Carter’s jury pools. Black people served on Carter’s
second jury. Both juries voted unanimously for his
conviction. As Carter’s own lawyer admitted, there
was “a mountain of evidence” against Carter. Jewison
slyly avoids exposing the audience Carter’s second
racially mixed jury.

Jewison used his slick Hollywood craftsmanship to
present Carter to us as an honorable serviceman who
returns home, orders a soda pop, and falls in love. It’s
almost a Norman Rockwell painting. But it’s totally
bogus. After four courts-martial in only twenty-one
months, the Army booted Carter’s useless ass out of
the service. He was a chronic troublemaker, just as he
had been in civilian life.

Jewison consciously falsifies the historical record
when he shows Rubin, then age eleven, defending a
childhood friend from a molester. Jewison carefully
sets up this scene by showing the audience the gritty
mean streets of Paterson, so as to explain why little
Rubin is so tough. In truth, eleven-year-old Rubin
was sent to a reformatory because he smashed a
bottle over a man’s head, and then stole the man’s
wristwatch and fifty-five dollars. The innocent
stranger required four sutures to close his head
wound. So ask yourself, what sort of eleven-year-old
would attack a grown man with a bottle? He didn’t
need the money. Carter came from an intact
supportive family. Both of his parents were usefully
employed. Little Carter simply
enjoyed assaulting strangers.

Rubin Carter, by his own admission, was just plain
evil. In a Saturday Evening Post article
published in 1964 Carter bragged about his
unprovoked knife attack on a stranger:
“That’s right, atrocious assault at age eleven. I stuck
a man with my knife. I stabbed him everywhere but
the bottom of his feet.”After his release from
Jamesburg Reformatory for that offense, Rubin
Carter and a partner would go out on the streets of
Paterson and “shoot at folks” just for the fun of
it. “Sometimes just to shoot at ‘em,
sometimes to hit ‘em, sometimes to kill
‘em.” If you had crossed his path, Rubin
Carter might have pumped a bullet into you. “I
couldn’t begin to tell you how many hits, muggings
and stickups,” Carter continued, “We’d just use the
guns like we had a license to carry them.”

Like Leni Riefensthal before him, Norman Jewison
used his craft to create an evil myth that is corrosive
and subversive to his nation. This film should have
been called Triumph of the Swill.

Four years after the Lafayette Grill murders, Rubin
Carter assaulted a slightly-built inmate named
Wallace and declared openly that “he would kill
Wallace” and that “if he had a weapon today Wallace
would be dead.” Carter’s psychiatric folder began to
fill up with references to grandiose paranoia; he
referred to himself as “God”. At about this time Dr
Sidney G. Fine stated that Rubin Carter “is beginning
to show psychotic behavior.” Another mental health
professional described Carter as “very unstable” and
“extremely aggressive” and “almost completely
lacking in controls” and a person who is likely to act
out “the tremendous amount of hostility and
aggression that is continuously boiling within him.”
In August of 1960 Doctor Henri M. Yaker declared
that Rubin Carter “Continues to be assaultive,
aggressive, hostile” and “sadistic.” Dr Yaker
diagnosed Carter as a sociopath.

R

ubin Carter was at liberty briefly in 1976, thanks to the vocal
support of numerous celebrities and the efforts of Carolyn Kelly, a righteous
Muslim woman who became the head of the Carter Defense Fund at the behest of the
boxer Muhammad Ali. A few weeks after his release he savagely assaulted Ms
Kelly. In a brief to the court, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office said:

Carolyn Kelly had been part of the triumphant Carter
entourage that journeyed about to fundraisers and
public appearances. She had ample opportunity to see
Carter up close. He guzzled large amounts of vodka
and when he drank he became nasty. Nonetheless, she
turned a blind eye to what he was. She says of the
punch that floored her: “I didn’t see it coming. I felt
everything getting dark. I remember praying to Allah,
‘Please help me’. . .Allah saved my life.” She had
extensive injuries. Journalist Chuck Stone, named
one of the leading black reporters of the century by
the National Association of Black Journalists, is
convinced that Carter attacked Carolyn Kelly. Stone
quoted Kelly as saying: “Rubin used to tell me time
and time again, ‘You’ve met Rubin and you know
Carter, but you’ve never met the Hurricane. The
Hurricane’s bad The Hurricane’s mean.’”

She is appalled by the gushing fawning acceptance of
Carter’s falsehoods by on-air media personalities
representing ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, the Pacifica
Stations, the Workers’ World News Service and the
like. America’s “journalists” fell all over themselves
like a bunch of silly star-struck school girls in their
eagerness to believe every lie and distortion of
Jewison’s cunning anti-American propaganda film.
Again and again they yattered on about how Carter
had been “framed” or “jailed for a crime he didn’t
commit.” The facts say otherwise; it’s all in the
historical record, in court records, in old newspapers.
The media research people had only to look for it.
Instead they went to the movies.

Carolyn Kelly has seen the light of truth. “If he could
do that to me, a woman who was not a threat to him,
then he has erased from my mind any doubt that he
could kill three or four innocent people.”